"Well, so what?
It's a bunch of treasure,
and it's just a simple little one-way story."
--Carl Barks

Carl Barks' "The Seven Cities of Cibola" is considered
one of his best adventure tales. It made the top fifteen in a
fan survey conducted some years back, and that was no small survey:
the researcher canvassed from Los Angeles to Stockholm. Readers
who grew up in the 1950s and don't otherwise remember Barks know
the collapsing canyons of Cibola, though I've noticed their memories
of quirkier tales like "Land Beneath the Ground" are
even stronger. Most conclusive, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg
hijacked the cities' emerald guardian for the opening sequence
of their first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In the process Barks' carved idol shrank a bit and turned to
solid gold, but his booby trap remained the same. Every reviewer
worth his salt knows of this borrowing and, for want of better
things to talk about, will parade it. If the comic wasn't a cultural
icon before Indy, it certainly is today.

Yet for all the fuss and
fan worship, it seems to me that "Cibola" is a story
in which nothing much happens--nothing, that is, until the last
three pages, when the pent-up energy of the tale is released
in a single explosive panel. Until then we are treated to elements
of a good adventure, but in a very leisurely fashion. Scrooge
sets out not to discover Cibola but to grub for arrowheads as
a way of relieving his boredom. The gold relics that spark his
real quest are unearthed by accident when a clay pot breaks.

With the appearance of
the Beagle Boys, McDuck's leading foes, we might expect the plot
to pick up pace, but the burglars also seem out of their depth.
With no money bin to assault, they eavesdrop and follow rather
than confronting the ducks head-on. When paths cross in the desert,
it's by chance, and the Beagles do not press their advantage;
they steal the ducks' water and move on. When ducks and Beagles
meet a second time, our heroes are simply seized and imprisoned.
Each encounter is over in half a page.

The ghost ship that points
the way to Cibola also appears by chance, and all it does is
sit in the desert. It's been sitting there 400 years!

If you think this assessment
harsh, consider what Barks did with similar plot threads in later
stories. The phantom ship that leads to the hoard of "The
Flying Dutchman" is a robust and bellicose spook, a kind
of storm god to be cursed one moment and placated the next. By
the end of the story Barks has explained away the apparition
in terms of pack ice and mirages, but that doesn't diminish the
name-calling edge in his drama as the ducks struggle against
the Dutchman, whom they dub "ghostly bully" and "our
pal." By the same token, "The Money Well"
keeps everyone's adrenaline flowing through a series of deliberate
confrontations with the Beagles, a war of wits in which taunts
and tricks are traded on a regular basis. Emotionally this is
very satisfying, as Scrooge observes at story's end.

In "Cibola"
there is no discernible conflict, no Glittering Goldie or Chisel
McSue to grapple with. There isn't even a moral crisis of the
kind that pervades "Tralla La," though we hear a note
of tragic regret for the fate that overtook the Indians who originally
inhabited Cibola. This is the first in a new breed of story,
the first Uncle Scrooge treasure hunt, and it's plain Barks was
feeling his way--which is not necessarily a bad thing. The comic
is constructed quite skillfully to make the reader grope along
with Barks and the ducks, puzzling out a path across the desert.
When the preliminary business with arrowheads is over and the
story actually gets rolling, it unfolds like a parchment map
or the account of an archaeological trek in the National Geographic
Magazine. Our pleasure derives not so much from reaching
the Seven Cities as from moving observantly toward them.

Barks' own interest in
Cibola was sparked by a visit to his friend Al Koch, manager
of the welfare office in Indio, California. Koch, who was something
of an authority on local Indian tribes, took the artist to "a
place on the Thousand Palms Road where an ancient Indian trail
wended over a mesa. There we saw rings of stones, cremation sites,
and most of all worn steps up the far side of the mesa that indicated
the trail had been used for centuries by traders from the Arizona
tribes." That evening, over "copious draughts of bourbon
and ale," Barks blocked out the opening pages of his new
Scrooge adventure. As a form of acknowledgement he drew Koch
into the story, kicking the Beagle Boys out of his office.

The rest of the comic
coalesced around a yarn Barks overheard in a restaurant, where
a rancher was holding forth about seeing the Lost Ship of the
Desert after a heavy windstorm. Barks had a feeling the rancher
himself was a bit of a windbag, but he headed for a library to
check out the facts. What he came up with was a wealth of surmise
and scattered history that could be woven into his comic.

"Little accounts
had cropped up in the paper every once in a while of people who
were delirious from thirst who saw the ship. I found that at
one time it was believed to have been a ship lost from a survey
party going up the Colorado, and at another time that it was
believed to be a flat-bottomed barge that got picked up by a
tidal wave generated by an earthquake. I figured I could go to
town on that idea because nobody could say I was wrong."
To lend his version credibility, he invoked the name of an actual
Spanish naval captain, Francisco de Ulloa. The houses and kivas
of Cibola he borrowed from a photograph in the National Geographic.

"The tale results
from more research than I usually devoted to my comic work,"
Barks admitted in later years. It shows. With the exception of
the Geographic photo, the artist was drawing on verbal
sources that relied on weight of information to engage a reader's
interest. On the comic page this translates into rather cerebral
sequences in which the ducks themselves do research, reading
the Woodchucks' Guidebook, the sandy topography, the ship's
log, and the Indian pictographs. Only the cinematic quality of
Barks' desert scenery brings these panels to life. The historical
characters are long gone, and they were less actors in the drama
than victims of flood and sickness. By the time the ducks appear,
Captain Ulloa and the canyon-dwellers have dwindled into spectral
voices preserved in the logbook and pictographs. "Cibola"
is the one Scrooge adventure in which the lost world, though
it remains intact for sightseeing, is quite dead. No Larkies,
Peeweegahs, or pygmy Arabs lurk in the ocotillo to challenge
the ducks' invasion of their turf.

At some level Barks must
have realized this. In a desperate attempt at legerdemain, he
created a spectacular climax to distract us from the static quality
of his first twenty-five pages. He blitzed the Seven Cities,
nearly killed his treasure hunters, and in fact wiped out their
memory--the very faculty of research and storytelling. As a result
the adventure comes crashing to a halt, leaving ducks, Beagles,
and readers shell-shocked. Never before had the artist imposed
such a full stop on one of his comics.

Five years later, as if
to prove the worth of his plotline after all, Barks reworked
it as "The Prize of Pizarro." Again we follow the ducks
up an ancient treasure trail to an Indian stronghold; again they
find a golden hoard protected by a doomsday weapon. But what
a difference in tone and pacing! By moving the Spanish galleon
up front and introducing the logbook--in this case an army captain's
letter--on the third page, Barks not only gets the adventure
off to a brisk start, he gives the ducks an opportunity to interact
with history rather than researching it. In fact, the letter
becomes integral to the action. Scrooge reads it out a line at
a time while his nephews cavil and comment, just as they did
with the Dutchman. Pizarro's soldier might almost be there egging
them on.

An even more animated
exchange takes place with the Indians, who are very much alive
in this story. Though our heroes never meet them face to face,
the reader is privy to a continuing dialogue of expectation and
surprise as the Incas watch from the rocks, the ducks trigger
one booby trap after another, and both parties react. It's a
rich source of wordplay and laughter, elements conspicuously
lacking in "Cibola," and it is significant that Lucas
and Spielberg borrowed equally from "Pizarro" for their
third Indiana Jones film. Even the famous trap in Raiders
bears a sneaking resemblance to the Incas' Bridge of the Roaring
Skull Cracker. Yet one tends to recall the more destructive
weapon triggered by the emerald idol. Why?

Having faulted "Cibola"
for its slow pace and lack of human drama, we have to concede
that it, not "Pizarro," is the tale fans remember.
Last month, when I wrote that art is about emotion, I didn't expect to fall back
on this dictum so soon. But it's true: something in that moccasin-beaten
trail on the Thousand Palms mesa spoke to Barks, lodged in his
mind like an arrowhead, and drew legend to it. In the same way,
Raiders was a foregone conclusion the minute Lucas and
Spielberg saw Barks' emerald idol--the one false bit of archaeology
in an otherwise superbly researched story. For them it didn't
matter. That statue crystallized all the thrills of pulp fiction
into one shining image which eventually gave birth to three Indiana
Jones epics.

Emotional resonances are
what carry "Cibola," cause scenes and fragments to
linger in our mind long after the original comic has found its
way to the dustbin or the collector's mylar bag. Joy of discovery,
relief at finding a trickle of muddy water, the eerie thrill
of treading a weathered deck and turning pages in an ancient
logbook--these feelings are as vivid and intangible as the desert
wind. It's a tribute to Barks that he was able to invoke this
wind with such power that it overcame his occasional shortcomings
as a storyteller.